I had three hours to walk around Rome on my return from Frascati to the UK. I decided to wing it, setting out from Roma Termini with no map and my phone off.

Apart from a lot of chaps trying in vain to sell me an umbrella to ward off a few measly drops of rain (I was wearing a coat with a hood), the first thing I found was a tunnel.

I decided not to venture down it, but instead to follow the lady with the red umbrella.

She went into a shop, so I realigned my Douglas-Adams-inspired navigational method to this nun.

This turned out to be entirely the right thing to do, as I ended up exactly where I needed to spend my remaining leisure time: The Forum.

The scale of The Forum is mind-boggling. I walked up and down and side to side across the space, pausing many times to look, and look again, at all the layers of history revealed. My knowledge of history is appallingly thin, but even without the depth of context, it gives the impression of a vast and powerful empire, which sank slowly into my stunned brain.

The seagulls seemed to think they owned the place.

The people-watching is pretty great, too.

A couple of colour images, just to break things up a bit...

You could buy fridge magnets from the tat merchant stalls with the SQPR inscription. They also had some wonderfully tacky ones of the Pope. I got one for the bloke, inscribed “Habemus Papam Francesco”. Those of you who know his real name will understand why I found this hysterical.

Ancient & modern superimposed.

Oh all right, seagull, you can be the focal point of this image.

Artfully strewn ruins. They did make me wonder if they’d been left where they were excavated or had been painstakingly placed to maximise aesthetic viewing pleasure.

Layers of domes.

The presidential palace.

I reluctantly turned my feet away from The Forum to see if I could find one more object of interest before returning to the train station. (Notice that despite spending two hours exploring The Forum thoroughly, I managed to miss the Colosseum. *slow clap for self*) But at least I managed to find the Trevi Fountain.

It's stunning. I would love to have the leisure in future to spend some time reading up about it before a longer visit. I did that before I went to Prague ten years ago (!) and it really enriched the four-day trip.